Dirty Gerty's Hurdy Gurdy

GERTYHURDYGURDY

Saturday, December 18, 2010

Fear not the heat of the sun As you turn your back to shadow, And find a fiercer brand Upon your brow Than any night or curmudgeon shade Could possibly avow.

The world has feral brevity To mark its face; A panther’s footprint The strange allure Of finding death much deader Than it ever was before.

But you have borne a shadow By turning your face to Apollo, Ripped from womb The blond canal That made its voice grow silent Makes it still grow tonal.

And you listen for a cry To tune your currents to Simois; For a tired Andromache Lost beyond the world Weeping in needle point rivers With currents yet unfurled.

There’s nothing you can give Not to negate her death; But to pretend she lives Just this little shadow Fussing upon your breast You feed it to the gallows.

You give it to the sun This little brand you birthed; Still to find what brands her face A light where shadow has no place To run its fatal glory Makes you her murderer.

. There's so much that can be said of shadow. It really is what the sun brands upon us. When I wrote this poem, tonight, I wanted to figure Demeter not just as a sad sobering mother. But as a woman implicating herself in the murder of her daughter (Persepone).

The last stanza, you give it to the sun... makes you her murderer, is significant in the logic of my unhinged mind for one reason. It attempts to warrant Demeter's insanity, waiting half the year for her daughter's return. The poem is meant to be Demeter thinking to herself, believe it or not. And I suppose, she feels she is the murderer because she sacrifices what brands her (Demeter) in order to see a place where there are no shadows, her daughter's artless face. Only to realize, this would be murder, because her daughter has inexorably changed. PERSEPOHE has been murdered, already, you see. A part of her is murdered each year, re-creating a succession of counterfeits, much like the seasons, when leaves wither and are re-created, for example...

It's meant, despite being horrid, to implicate the fulfillment of fantasy in the murder of dreams.

Saturday, December 11, 2010

I've been coursing through two poems, in Paris Spleen and The Flowers of Evil. L'INVITATION AU VOYAGE (Paris Spleen) and Invitation To The voyage (The Flowers of Evil). In the former, Baudelaire presents a black tulip (which I utilized in a poem on The Soul of Art), and a blue dahlia. Both incomparable, both part of this wonderful country, a country of Cocaigne, where a curtain's fold breathes forth a curious perfume, a perfume of Sumatra whispering "come back." The Soul of the abode.

I'm intrigued by these two flowers because they can only thrive here. A country so beautiful and full of calm. And Baudelaire asks "Would you not there be framed within your own analogy, would you not see yourself reflected there in your own 'correspondence' as the mystics say?"

For some time this question baffled me. I wondered to what analogy he could be referring, and something struck me, reading Invitation to the Voyage (The Flowers of Evil). Here Baudelaire speaks of the soul's loneliness, noting her own "sweet and secret native tongue." The Black Tulip and the Blue Dahlia speak their own sweet and secret native tongue. They are lonely, except in this land, where beauty and calmness prevail, they are framed within themselves. Their endemic strangeness speaks back to them as beauty, which speaks back to the strangeness as revelation. And what is this revelation, except "come back?"

I think both poems speak to the soul not only of poetry but the poet. The notion of poetry being an invented instinct is something I've believed for quite some time. But, the notion of "coming back," is more endemic to poetry (and the poet) than anything I can surmise. The strange beauty of the flowers, which would be outcasts anywhere else, is like the images a poet sets forth. The creative trajectory, where imagery speaks to itself and the form a poem wants to take talks back.

There's a state, I'm not even certain I can fashion, of reciprocity, where strangeness feeds on beauty and beauty strangeness. But the two can only be had in an environment that allows them to thrive. Some would say this environment is the soul. I would say this environment is art, a poem, a painting, etc., To which the soul is conceived. Much as we conceive nature with artfulness. For we can only view it (nature) through human eyes, so the art is actually more natural than nature (itself). The same is true with the soul. It is, actually, found through an invitation to a strange land, the land of art, and re-creation. The land that asks us to come back, to everything we are, and all we never knew but always had.

I'm including below a poem I wrote within the eternity of an hour today, about Narcissus; some of the thoughts herein manifest in what I've written above, at least the concept of "coming back":

About Me

I have an MA in English/Lit. I adore writing, the blood life, and am presently working on my poetry. I've written two novels and a novella, but have never attempted publishing them. Because they no longer feel honest to me. I should say. I've also been living with systemic lupus, with the diagnosis, since I was 19. When I turned 25, I was diagnosed with nephritis, a serious complication of lupus involving the kidneys. My kidneys have crescents and irreversible scarring. Yet, after chemo, prednisone, more chemo/immunotherapy CellCept...Myfortic (now) , I can say I am trying to keep myself stable. Needless to say, I do value life and beauty, which I define as the interconnectedness of nothing. Should you desire more, about me, message me.